It was only after he had gone that she missed the credit card, the euros and the transatlantic dollars.

Lew Crown would be back from his holidays by now, as the old woman in Pembridge Villas must also be. When another day went by and another and no police officers presented themselves at his parents' door, Lance began to feel a little more secure. She was old, her brain would be going and she hadn't noticed anyone had been in there. She must have seen the window, though. Lance refused to let himself worry about that. He'd got enough on his plate. That package must be fetched from his nan's place and taken over to Holloway.

Lance forgot he was out on bail on a charge of murder and arson, and began dreaming of the untold wealth that would accrue to him from the sale of the jewellery. Perhaps he'd get enough, not to buy a place – even he wasn't so naive as that – but to rent somewhere nice enough to make Gemma leave Fize and come to live with him. He tore the old woman's chequebook in two and cut her credit card in half.

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

It was just midday and the last patient was leaving her morning surgery. Mrs Khan had brought one of the twins with her this time, her seven-year-old son Hakim. Ella told her it was wrong to keep her child away from school now the autumn term had begun and the boy translated. Or may be didn't translate but told his mother whatever suited him. How was she to know? Mrs Khan got her usual prescription for tranquillisers, Ella having refused the sleeping pills she was asked for. Hakim was reading the prescription with an important air, nodding his head precociously, when Ella's phone rang. The practice receptionist said, 'He says he's called Joel, Ella.'

Ella sighed. She had been hoping to go home for a quiet lunchtime and afternoon with Eugene. 'Joel? What can I do for you?'

His voice, cracked, weak, gasping, was almost unrecognisable. 'Can you come? Now?'

'What's wrong?'

'I haven't taken too much. Should be all right. I only – want to – get – to . . .'

The last words were inaudible.

She ran, leaving Mrs Khan and Hakim staring. At the office door she called out Joel's address and told the receptionist to call 999. Within two minutes she was in her car. Miraculously, there wasn't much traffic and she was there before the ambulance. She hammered on Joel's door, yelled his name into the darkness through the letter box. She was downstairs again, begging a porter to break the door down when the paramedics came in, two tall men carrying their first aid bags. Between them they kicked the heavy door in.

'Why's it so dark?' one of them asked her.

'He likes it that way.'

They switched lights on, the feeble bulbs of low wattage, which were all Joel had, and one of them flung back the curtains. Joel was lying on the brown velvet sofa, sprawled on his back, dressed as he always was in jeans and old faded T-shirt, his long shaggy hair spread across his forehead and eyes as if he had pulled it down to hide his face. A dribble of frothy saliva trickled out of parted lips. On the low table were two containers half full of pills, a half-bottle of vodka and a pop-psychology book about schizophrenia.

Ella said, 'Help me get him on his feet.'

'We'll do that,' one of them said.

They began to walk him up and down, half dragging him. Ella raised the blind and opened windows. She read the labels on the pill containers, both made out to other people. Joel shuddered and twitched. His eyes stayed closed. She thought of his heart and the operation from which he wasn't yet fully recovered, and dared not give him adrenalin. She took hold of one of his arms and the paramedic stepped back. 'Joel, Joel, can you hear me? Speak to me, Joel.' She turned to the waiting man, 'Make coffee, would you?'

He was very quick. The coffee was too hot and they added cold water. Ella held it to Joel's lips. He shuddered and the cup rattled against his teeth but he sipped some of it, choked and moaned. His body sagged and without their support he would have fallen.

'You must drink it. Come on now. You must.'

This time he swallowed a mouthful and then another. His pale face took on a greenish tinge and at last a voice came out of his mouth, a voice that barely sounded human, 'Going to be sick.'

The older paramedic fetched a basin from the kitchen sink but he was too late. Joel threw up on the reddish brown Turkey carpet, his vomit much the same colour. Still kept on his feet, he began shaking and trembling, but he drank the water she brought him and at last uttered a long sigh.

'Shall we move him out of here now, doctor?'

'I'll come with him,' she said.

Dave and Lance's nan Kath had been sitting out on her balcony, sharing a bottle of wine and contemplating the traffic in the Harrow Road, which dawdled sluggishly below them. It was a fine warm evening, sunny and pleasant but for the foul air, foggy with pollution. Dave got up when the doorbell rang and let Lance in. Lance kissed his nan and looked longingly at the wine bottle.

'Oh, give him a glass, Dave, and open another bottle, why don't you.'

Sitting out there with a glass of Chardonnay in his hand reminded Lance painfully of such evenings spent with Gemma on her balcony. Would he ever see her again? He took a swig of his wine.

'I've got a bone to pick with you, my lad,' his nan said. 'That bag of stuff you left with me, it's made me nervous. What with you setting fire to old Gib's house and that East European getting killed, though I'll be the first to say that was no fault of yours, but all that's made me think maybe you're one of them terrorists. And what's in that bag is what I want to know?'

Lance said it wasn't true, he'd never set fire to Uncle Gib's house.

'Never mind that. You tell me what's in that bag. No, you show me.'

Dave came back with another bottle of Chardonnay, which he opened with a corkscrew that looked to Lance more like a Black and Decker.

'I've said it twice and I'll say it again. I want to know what's in that bag. And what's more, it's not going out of here till you've opened it and let me see. Isn't that right, Dave?'

'It is, Kath.'

Lance was starting to wish he hadn't come. But he had to retrieve the bag to take it to Mr Crown.

'You've got no choice,' said Dave. 'You open it or else your nan'll put it out with the trash. Or drop it in the canal, more like. She will, you know,' he went on admiringly, giving her a fond look. 'You know what she is, a real Iron Lady.'

'Where is it?' said Lance.

The package was produced. Lance took off the elastic bands and lifted out the pieces of jewellery, two diamond rings, two gold bracelets and a gold chain. Neither Kath nor Dave made a sound.

'It's mine,' said Lance, knowing he wouldn't be believed.

'Pull the other one,' said his nan, recovering her voice. 'Where d'you get it?'

'Posh place in Notting Hill.'

'Breaking and entering,' said Dave in a conversational tone. 'Was it after dark?'

'What if it was?'

'Then it's burglary.'

His nan reached for the bottle. 'Let's have another drink.' Two silent minutes were taken up with refilling the glasses. 'Traffic's easing off a bit,' she said.

'Till it starts again in the morning,' said Dave.

'You can look after that stuff for him, can't you?'

'Well, I can.'

'I was going to take it to a bloke in Holloway.'

'You don't want to do that,' Dave said quickly. 'You never know who you can trust in this game. Let me handle it. You won't be the loser.'

'OK, if you say so.' Lance was feeling quite relieved.

'Getting a bit chilly out here,' said his nan. 'The nights are drawing in. What say we all go down the Good King Billy for a quick one?'

'Or a slow one,' said Dave, suddenly in a cheerful mood.

* * *

What Ella called simply 'an emergency', phoning him in the late afternoon, threatened to deprive Eugene of her company until late. He sat watching television and eating sweets, something he hadn't done since he was a child, and he found that he was enjoying himself. Was it true, then, that he was happier without Ella than with her? He tried telling himself that he had been single too long, an ageing bachelor with the occasional girlfriend. It was simply that living with a woman was a state he wasn't yet really used to. But underlying these feelings all the time was the habit that had taken over his life. Even thinking about it brought him to reach for the pack – in Ella's absence it lay openly and open on the table in front of him – and help himself to a sweet. Giving up, phasing out, was now a distant memory.

It was September already and he was getting married in October. A few weeks of freedom to indulge himself in more or less unlimited amounts of Chocorange remained. He switched off the television, castigating himself for watching a mindless game show, and picked up with great care a small bowl of Sung Celadon porcelain that stood on the table beside the Chocorange pack. Once, he thought, he would have talked to himself of the Chocorange being beside the Sung bowl, not the other way about. He palpated the bowl delicately in his hands while he sucked the last sliver of his sweet.

If Ella were here he would even now be making excuses to her. He had to go upstairs to fetch something, he would make a phone call in his study so as not to disturb her, he must go outside and check that the tiresome Bathsheba wasn't once more using his rose bed as a feline convenience. Those few minutes away from her would give him the opportunity to suck a sweet. Though he knew it sounded like insanity, he had actually timed himself doing this and found that eating one lasted four minutes at most. When he came back to her he always craved another. Consuming one set off the longing again. No more than half an hour ever went by before he gave in to desire, made another excuse to escape and almost ran out to find one of his secret hoards.

She was beginning to notice. His sensitivity and percipience hadn't been blunted by his addiction. Once or twice lately she had asked him if he wasn't feeling well and when he said he was fine, asked if he was worried about something. Of course he was worried, perpetually troubled by this craving, and seeing no way – he had tried – to change. ''Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus, another thing to fall,' says Angelo. He and Ella had seen Measure for Measure in the summer and that line remained with him. But what if you tried desperately to resist and failed?

If you still fell, over and over? Angelo, of course, was principally referring to sexual indulgence. If he were honest, Eugene said to himself, alone in his house among his objets d'art, he was afraid of reaching a point where he preferred eating a sugar-free orangeflavoured chocolate sweet to making love.

That confession frightened him. He had never put it into words before, had never in fact been aware of it for very long. Perhaps it was new. It must mean that his habit was gaining increased power over him. But he was getting married in a few weeks' time. He was getting married so that he might live for the rest of his life with the woman he loved and so that he might make love to her as often as he and she chose. He looked at the pale-green bowl he held in his hands, looked into its depths as if, crystal-balllike, it could foretell his future. When he set it down, his now free left hand reached out to pick up the brown-and-orange pack, his now free right-hand finger and thumb picked out a sweet and put it into his mouth. What he had realised ought to be the jolt that shocked him out of this, shocked him into throwing all those packs away and beginning on the course of abstinence. Other people resisted temptation. They stopped smoking simply by ceasing to buy cigarettes. But they had nicotine patches, he thought. If only there were a Chocorange patch! The idea made him smile, then laugh. It was easy to laugh when he was sucking one of those delicious sweets.

He couldn't give up cold turkey, he knew he couldn't. He had tried. What would happen was an enforced deprivation, starting with the last days of their honeymoon when, sneaking into the bathroom in Como or going off for a solitary walk while Ella shopped somewhere, he finished up all the sweets he had brought with him. No more would be available in Italy. He would have to exist without them until they got home and then, even if he bought more – and he knew he would – because Ella would be living with him, not simply staying here four nights out of seven, the number he ate must necessarily be restricted. And gradually that number would grow less and less until the day came when it hardly seemed worth buying more. He must try to look on his marriage as the sure and certain cure for his habit. His marriage was his lifeline.

They were keeping Joel in overnight. He was weak and utterly enervated but consciousness had returned fully. She had sat with him for most of the afternoon and was there when he tried to sit up. Without asking him she had phoned his mother and told her what had happened, not saying it was a suicide attempt, which was what she suspected, but that her son had mistakely taken an overdose. Wendy Stemmer had arrived at five o'clock, anxious and exasperated, hair newly done, dressed in white broderie anglaise, and it was then that Ella had left the room and phoned Eugene.

Returning, she found Joel with his eyes tightly shut and his mother holding one of his long white hands.

'What will he do next?' Mrs Stemmer asked her in a despairing tone.

Ella felt like saying that the remarkable thing about Joel was that he did almost nothing, but she only smiled.

'Is he going to be all right? He won't tell me anything.'

'I'm sure he is. But you must ask the doctor who is looking after him here.'

Wendy Stemmer tottered off in narrow-strap stilt-heeled sandals to do that and Ella took her place but without holding Joel's hand. He opened his eyes and said, 'Has she gone?'

'She's coming back. She's very anxious about you, Joel.'

'I know you think I meant to kill myself but I didn't.'

'All right. If you didn't I'm very glad.'

'I want to tell you what I was really doing.'

'That's fine but here's your mother coming back. Do you want to tell her?'

'No!' If he had been stronger it would have been a shout. As things were, it came out as a strangled gasp.

His mother had been told he ought not to be left alone in his flat. Not even during the day. Ella went to speak to the doctor. Discreetly, he refused to say what he evidently thought, that this was a failed suicide attempt, and when she told him about the midday phone call, that rescuing Joel hadn't been due to any great intuition or acuity on her part, he agreed with obvious relief that his brush with death had probably been an accident.

'I think he wants to tell me about it but it must be in his own time.'

'Oh, I fully agree.'

Wendy Stemmer had slipped off her punishing sandals and they lay on their sides under the bed. 'He seems very fond of you,' she said accusingly at Joel's bedside but with her back turned to him. 'Tell me something. Are you his girlfriend?'

'Of course not. I'm his doctor.'

'I asked because I've never known him so keen on a woman before. I always thought he must be gay, though he didn't give any signs of that either.'

Ella was so angry she took a few seconds before she could trust herself to speak. 'Mrs Stemmer, don't you think you could persuade your husband to be reconciled with Joel? If you tell him how lonely Joel is, how he lives in the dark and now he's – accidentally, of course – taken an overdose of – well, pills that weren't prescribed for him?'

She watched the woman's face as a deep flush spread over it under the thick make-up. Saying that she knew some of the sedatives came from his mother, would do neither Joel nor her any good. It was useless. 'Couldn't you try, Mrs Stemmer?'

'It won't be any good.' Wendy Stemmer bent over, perhaps to hide her face, and eased her sandals on again. She looked up and Ella thought she spoke for the first time with sincerity and maybe from her heart. 'I've tried. I'm always trying. Last time I told him he ought to see Joel he hit me.' She drew in her breath. 'Right across my face.'

Ella had nothing to say.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

Lance thought he had heard the last of Lupescu's death and the destruction of Uncle Gib's house. If the police were serious they would have done something about it by now. The only condition of his bail was that he stay a certain distance away from witnesses' houses, like Uncle Gib's new place and the people next door. He didn't want to go near them so that wasn't a problem. It wasn't enough to keep him awake at night, not even in that uncomfortable bed in close proximity to the car tyres and the broken bike. Last night a defunct electric mixer had fallen off a shelf on to his head. Besides, he had the prospect of an influx of money when Dave sold the rings, the bracelet and the gold chain. He spent a lot of his waking hours thinking what he would do with the money, spending most of it on Gemma but some on new clothes for himself as well as an iPod, and a really good mobile that would play radio, show TV and take photos.

Like callous landlords who require their paying guests to vacate their rooms and indeed the whole building in daylight hours, Lance's parents wanted him out of the flat for most of the day. If they had had jobs themselves it might have been different but they were always at home, watching television and exploring the Internet. Their son wasn't welcome.

His father put it to him very plainly: 'If you had work it'd be another story. But you don't and no prospect so far as I can see.'

Lance thought this a bit OTT considering neither of them had jobs but when he said so his mother ignored the jibe and said, 'I don't know how that poor old Gilbert put up with you under his feet all day.'

The one advantage of being there was that there was plenty to eat before he left in the morning and when he got home at night. His mother had grown up in a family where there was a tradition that if you missed a meal or failed to finish everything on your plate and or ask for seconds, you were likely to collapse from inanition. A story told by her grandmother and religiously passed down the generations was of one of their relatives, known as Cousin Lil, who had missed breakfast, as a result fainted in a train going to Ramsgate and never fully recovered. So Lance was stuffed with eggs and bacon and sausages in the morning, and plied with burgers or Indian takeaway in the evening, while his mother made lunch for him to sustain him in the intervening time. She might taunt him with having no paid employment, though jobless herself, for in her estimation there was no disgrace in a woman being without a job, but to Lance, carrying a thick package of ham and cheese sandwiches and half a dozen Jaffa cakes in his backpack, then forcing himself to walk the streets and sit on park benches, staring at passers-by and dozing, was what having work must be like.

He was leaving the flats at nine in the morning, the witching hour at which he was banished, his backpack laden with food, when two men got out of the police car parked outside and invited him to accompany them to the station. One of them he recognised. It was the detective sergeant who had asked most of the questions last time. Lance said OK because it was useless to argue and, besides that, it would be a change sitting at a table in an interview room instead of trudging up and down Ladbroke Grove and hanging about in Holland Park.

The young lady lawyer came back again and cups of tea were brought. They asked him all the same questions all over again and the other one, the one he hadn't seen before, said the DNA sample they'd taken matched the DNA on various objects that had survived the fire.

'Mr Platt lived in the house for six months,' the solicitor said. 'Naturally, he touched things. What did you expect?'

Some guy in a petrol station told them that Lance had paid for fifteen litres of premium unleaded several weeks before. At first he didn't know what they meant, then he remembered paying for Dwayne's petrol when he fetched Gemma's stuff over to Blagrove Road in his van.

'I never put it in no bottle, I never touched it,' he said. 'My mate put it straight in his tank.'

They looked as if they didn't believe him. They asked more questions. Then the one he recognised started asking him about Dorian Lupescu. Wasn't it a fact that he was jealous of Lupescu? His girlfriend had said she fancied Lupescu – was that true?

'She's not my girlfriend,' Lance said sadly.

A shaft of pain threatened to bend him double when it occurred to him that it might be Gemma who had told them this. But no, she wouldn't. Not his Gemma, his love, his sweetheart. Fize would. Fize's pal what's-his-name would. Uncle Gib certainly would. Some bastard had betrayed him. He was sorely in need of comfort.

'Can I eat my sandwiches now?'

'I don't see why not,' said the detective sergeant. 'We'll take a break.' He looked at his watch and muttered something into the machine recording all this. 'Back in half an hour.'

It went on for a few more hours but they let him go on bail again without a charge and without any explanation, only to tell him he must attend court when required and not interfere with the process of justice. He could easily guarantee that; he didn't know how to.

Ella had accepted an offer for her flat. It wasn't the first but it was the best she had yet had and she was satisfied. Eugene had kept telling her that it was of no great importance whether she sold it now or in a year's time. They were not in need of the money that would be derived from the sale. But, without saying a word of this to him, she wanted to have a substantial sum of her own to bring with her to the marriage and that she would have. The flat had been hers for fifteen years and had been free of mortgage for two. It brought her some gratification to know that she would sign the contract for the sale well before her wedding.

Next day she had arranged to visit Joel but first, on her afternoon off, she was going to drive over to the flat – she hadn't been near it for the past fortnight – and bring away various items that might as well be moved before the removers fetched the rest on completion day. That would be after she returned from her honeymoon. The place looked rather drab and dusty. But someone had liked it enough to pay a considerable sum for it and after the furniture had been taken out she would employ a team to clean it up for the incoming residents. First she packed into cardboard crates all the remaining books and, into suitcases, all her clothes. In the bathroom cabinet were a lot of toiletries she would probably never use but there was no point in leaving them where they were. She loaded them into plastic carriers and, making several journeys, put the lot into the boot and back of the car.

Eugene said he was going to buy her a new car for a wedding present. Like many women she couldn't get excited at the prospect. She was rather fond of her five-year-old car but giving her things and choosing presents for her brought Eugene so much pleasure she disliked stopping him. He was at the gallery but would be home by six. Ella carried her boxes and bags indoors.

She was very aware that Eugene had a greater appreciation of beauty and elegance than she had. She might like organising her life and tidying up details but neatness in the home wasn't as important to her as it was to him. She had determined some time before that she would conform to him in these things. He did so much for her and she, she sometimes thought, so little for him. This stuff she had brought back from her flat she would put away neatly before he came home, starting perhaps with the clothes and all these bottles and jars.

There was plenty of wardrobe space in the house, including a walk-in cupboard opening off their bedroom. Ella hung up the dresses and the suits she had brought with her, folded sweaters and laid them on the shelves. Then she went into the second bathroom, well aware that all the half-used cosmetics and half-empty bottles of shampoo and bath essence would never be finished up. No doubt there were some people who would have thrown these things out without wasting time, just as there were some who took a garment to the charity shop when it hadn't been worn for six months. She wasn't among them. Foolishly, she admitted, she revolted against the waste of it even when she knew keeping stuff you would never use was mere hoarding for hoarding's sake.

This cabinet, seldom used except by the occasional guest, was probably empty. She wasn't much surprised to find a safety razor, a tube of arnica and some wads of cottonwool in the top drawer. These were the things visitors left behind. All the other drawers were empty but for the bottom one, in which was a pack of some sort of sweets. Sugar-free sweets, apparently. The packaging was brown and orange with a badly executed design on it of liquid chocolate being poured into a half-orange. Ella put it into the top drawer with the razor and the arnica, and tipped her bottles and jars into the bottom one. Carli again? She had just remembered finding a similar pack of sweets in the secret drawer in the kitchen. Carli was very absent-minded for someone so young, leaving these sweets of hers all over the house. She would ask her about it next time they encountered each other.

The books next. Ella loved Eugene's bookshelves. They had all been made for him from golden-grey walnut and fitted to the walls in the study and drawing room. There had apparently been a dilemma as to whether these should be plain shelves or cabinets with glass doors. Ella was glad he had decided against the glazing because she much preferred open bookcases where everything could be clearly seen to cupboards with keys in their locks through whose windows spines were obscured or lost behind wood uprights.Tidy, precise Eugene had arranged all his books in alphabetical order if they were novels and according to subject and then alphabetically in the case of non-fiction. Ella enjoyed just standing in front of them and giving herself up to exulting in their beauty and the pristine state in which Eugene kept them.

She had intended to fit the books she had brought with her in among those already there. There were no more than twenty of them, some kept from her schooldays or received as presents, for Ella usually bought paperbacks and passed them on to her sister or a friend. But, like most people who love reading, she found it wasn't possible for her simply to shuffle the novels around on the shelf and push the newcomers in among them. Each one she took out she had to study, recall how she had enjoyed it or otherwise, read its first line and before she set it down, congratulate herself on keeping it so well. These classics from the nineteenth and early twentieth century in their dark-blue or mulberry-red binding wouldn't disgrace Eugene's shelves.

E. M. Forster's The Longest Journey had better go next to the existing copy. They seemed to be identical editions. She was about to move Eugene's own copies, one of them necessarily on to the shelf below, when she heard his key in the lock. The time had flown past.

He walked into the room. His expression was quite unlike his usual pleasant composure, the look of a considerate and civilised man, but frowning and aghast. He shouted at her. 'What are you doing?'

She flinched. Before she could reply – she was on her feet now – a transformation seemed to come over him, as if a hand had passed over his features, wiping away the cruel mask and leaving a gentle sweetness behind.

'I'm sorry, darling. I don't know what came over me. I've had a hard day.'

'Who did you think I was?'

It was an opening and he took it. 'It's rather dark in here. A strange person kneeling by the bookcase gave me a shock. Very silly, I know. Still, we have once been burgled. Look, let me do those books, will you?'

'If you like,' she said, still a little stunned.

'We'll go and have a drink first.' They went into the study. 'Why don't we have a bottle of champagne?'

She smiled, took his arm. 'You can't be going to propose to me again?'

'I will if you like,' he said. 'What are we celebrating, then?'

A lucky escape, he thought. An amazing stroke of good fortune. If I had been five minutes – no, half a minute – later . . . 'The new exhibition, Priscilla Hart's show,' he said. 'It's going well. I sold three of her miniatures this afternoon.'

'Good,' she said. 'Let's celebrate for ourselves too. Not long to our wedding now.'

He kissed her. Because he had been saved from humiliation at her hands, had vindicated himself perfectly by pretending he had seen a burglar, he felt a surge of love for her. It was going to be all right. They were going to be very happy.

The shortening days of September seemed each one more beautiful than the last, the sky a clear blue, the air as warm as on a July day. Only it hadn't been like this in July but grey and cold and constantly raining. Now, although the sun was strong, in the shade you felt the chill of autumn. It was too late for true heat. The time for hot days and mild evenings had gone by, and the nights were cold. Ella noticed how tired the trees were beginning to look, their leaves worn out by onslaughts of wind and rain and now by belated sunshine.

The gardens in front of Joel's block were scattered with fallen leaves, not those of the final shedding, which would come in November, but the September drop, which relieves trees of their weight. They crunched under her feet as she walked up the steps. The lift seemed to rise especially slowly and, when she rang Joel's bell, a woman she had never seen before opened the door to her. She introduced herself as the day carer and, although she didn't say so, Ella thought she might be responsible for letting more light into the flat.

In the grim and gloomy living room the blind had been raised and the curtains half drawn apart. In the increased light it was possible to see how shabby the furnishings were, the only bright and fresh object an amber glass vase on the table full of orange coloured chrysanthemums. Had the day carer brought them or even Wendy Stemmer?

Joel lay on the sofa. He wore dark glasses but had also spread a black scarf over his face. He gave no sign of having seen or heard her. She sat down in one of the chairs drawn up to the table and asked him how he was feeling. To her surprise, after a long while, he took the scarf off his face and sat up. Because he hadn't replied she said it again, 'How are you?'

'Well enough.' His voice was low and lifeless.

'When you were in the hospital did they give you any tests? Did they check your heart?'

'You think maybe I damaged it taking all those pills? They did a lot of tests.' He spoke indifferently. 'They wouldn't have let me out if there was anything wrong, would they?'

'I will check with them,' Ella said. 'Did your parents find the carer for you?'

'Ma did. He's paying, I suppose. I don't want her. She opens the curtains. She brings me food and drink and whatever.' He gave a small unamused laugh. 'I think she's frightened of me – well, I know she is. It's the shades and the scarf. Do I look frightening, Ella?'

'Not to me.' She wondered as she said it if that was quite true.

Still wearing the glasses, he turned his gaze towards the corner where hung the long mirror in a carved mahogany frame in which the bronze face was reflected. And would have been reflected again in the mirror behind it and again and again infinitely. Today the room was too dim for anything to be seen in the glass but patches of shine and dull shadows. Joel's face contorted as he seemed to peer. He stretched his neck and concentrated, subsided with a sigh.

'I think he's gone. I really think so. Sometimes I hear a whisper but I think that may be me imagining things. I haven't seen him, not since I came round – after what I did, I mean. Do you want to know why I did what I did?'

Ella could see nothing but she knew the reflections were there, the faces half turned, the never-ending faces . . . Was Mithras also there, though neither of them could see him? 'I don't think you meant to kill yourself,' she said.

'No. No, I didn't. I'll tell you about it. I haven't told anyone, not Ma or any of the people at the hospital.' He took off the glasses and blinked as if, instead of a greyish dimness, the room were flooded with brilliant light. 'Would you like something to eat or drink? I've never asked you that before, have I? I don't think I've ever asked anyone that before.' He had, once, and Ella remembered the glass of water, but she didn't correct him. 'Rita's here and she'll do it,' he said. 'She likes doing it.'

'I don't want anything, thanks, Joel.'

'I collected up those pills. It doesn't matter how. I don't go out much but I went out and bought myself a half-bottle of vodka. I liked the taste. They say it hasn't a taste but it has and I like it. I could take to drink – shall I?'

She ignored this. As she had thought before, in any sustained conversation he might begin by sounding adult but he gradually became more and more like a child. 'Tell me, are you taking your medication? The pills you get from Miss Crane, I mean.'

He nodded, turning his eyes once more to the mirror.

'Sure?'

'I promise, Ella. Shall I tell you why I did what I did?' It was the second time of asking.

'If you want to.'

'Do you remember what I told you about having a near-death experience? When something went wrong under the anaesthetic?'

She nodded, feeling suddenly cold in the warm close room. It was fear she felt as shivers touched her skin, moving across her shoulders and down her arms. Don't be silly, she told herself, get yourself together. You're a doctor, you've been a doctor for fifteen years.

He seemed not to notice her slight shrinking. His eyes were turned away from her, his gaze far away on some other plane. 'Mithras,' he said, 'I wanted him to go. I brought him back with me from that white city at the end of the river. I think maybe he was one of the angels on the battlements. But no, that's not right. They had wings and he didn't. I wanted him to go. He was getting bigger, you see. No, I don't quite mean that. He was getting clearer and his voice was too. He never said anything terrible like I was to harm someone but I kept thinking he'd start. I thought that if he – well, went on getting bigger and louder and stronger he'd take me over, he'd take this place over.

'I once saw a picture. It was an illustration for Alice in Wonderland. I was only about eight or nine. Alice had drunk something and it made her grow big. She grew huge till she filled the house, she had to lie down, her arms and legs couldn't get through the doors. I don't know why but that picture frightened me terribly. I screamed when I first saw it and I couldn't get it out of my head. That was how I was starting to feel about Mithras, that he'd get so big he'd never be able to get out. He'd take me over, kind of absorb me. I knew I'd have to do something.'

'What did you do?' she asked, although she guessed.

'I thought that if I had another near-death experience I'd go back to that place, the river and the meadows and the city at the end of it, I mean. I'd see all those white walls like castle walls and see the angels walking there. And Mithras would come with me, he would, he'd want to because it was the only way for him to get back there. And he'd stay. He'd be happy and I'd be free.'

'So you took the pills and the vodka to get yourself near death?'

'That's what I did. I told Mithras to come with me and he came, I think he did, and when I started to leave again I think I left him behind but I don't know. I didn't see the city or the river or the sunshine, Ella. It was all dark with kind of moving shapes, vague dark shapes moving in the dark. I talked to you out of the dark and then I – then I sort of passed out. Now I keep looking for Mithras but I can't see him and it's only in the night time that I hear his voice. It's coming from a long long way off so I know he's talking to me from the city.'

She sat quite still, feeling a kind of despair. There was nothing to say.

'I went to all that trouble to take him back,' Joel said, 'but now he's gone, I half want him back. I miss him.' He lifted to her an abject little boy's face and met her eyes for the first time since she arrived there. 'I'm so lonely, Ella.'

She reached for his hand but thinking this inadequate for his great need, got up, sat beside him and took him in her arms. Holding him, she felt his heart beating against her as if he were more afraid than she was.

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

Once more they were out on the balcony, watching the roadway. A crowd of gesticulating men ran about shouting at the driver of an articulated truck, which had wedged itself between a bendy bus and a concrete mixer. Lance's nan had let him in before rushing back to her ringside seat, anxious not to miss more than a minute of the sitcom currently being enacted in the Harrow Road. Lance followed her out there. His hospitable grandmother had already poured him a large glass of Pino Grigio. Enthralled by the sight of the lorry driver landing a mighty punch on the bus driver's jaw, Dave passed Lance the crisps without turning round.

His nan leant over the railing and began yelling at the lorry driver. 'Give him another, mate! Them bendy buses are a menace! They think they own the bloody road.' Spectators in the street turned their faces upwards as one. 'Who d'you think you're looking at?'

'Cool it now, Kath,' said Dave, as police sirens sounded coming closer. 'You calm down. We don't want no trouble.'

Lance looked at him admiringly. Dave seemed to be the only one he had ever come across, within the family or outside it, able to exert any sort of control over his nan. Two officers had got out of their car and strolled over to the men who had moved into a stand-off. Things quickly quietened down as the concrete mixer was expertly reversed through a narrow gap and the crowd began to dissolve.

Lance's nan, deprived of entertainment, sighed resignedly and turned to him. 'So how's the world treating you, lovely?'

'I'm good,' said Lance with a hopeful glance at Dave.

Dave refilled their glasses. He shook the last of the crisp crumbs into the palm of his hand, dropped the bag over the railing and watched it float gently down into the street below. Then he turned to Lance and smiled in an avuncular sort of way. 'You'll be wanting to know what them bits and bobs fetched.'

'Rings and things and buttons and bows,' said his nan unexpectedly.

'The market's very dodgy.' Dave might have been talking about the current state of the euro. 'There's like a world recession. Still, I've done my best for you.' He pulled out of his pocket two dirty and crumpled notes, a twenty and a ten. The twenty had a rent in it mended with Sellotape.

Deeply disappointed, Lance stared. 'That all you got?'

'Didn't I say the market's dodgy? After I took my ten per cent that's the best I could do. It's not like they was diamonds.'

Diamonds were exactly what Lance believed they were. In those few moments, sitting on his nan's balcony, the light fast fading and the air taking on an autumnal cooling, a metamorphosis came over him. Uncle Gib, in one of his biblical phrases, would have said that the scales fell from his eyes. His father might have said that he began to grow up. He saw that the trust he habitually had in people, in almost anyone, was misplaced. No one was going to do anything much for him. They never had and they never would. He was out on his own.

When his nan said the nights were drawing in and it was time for them all to go down the Good King Billy, he got up and walked through the doorway into the living room. But instead of waiting to accompany them meekly to the pub – where he would have been expected to spend a good half of his thirty pounds – he said, not 'Cheers', but like someone three times his age, 'Goodnight,' failing to add, as he normally would have done, the obligatory 'See you later'. They were silent, apparently aware that all was not well. He let himself out, went quickly down the stairs and out into the street, turning in the opposite direction to the one that led to the pub.

Of the hundred people who had been invited, eighty-three had accepted their invitations. The hotel on the river, licensed for wedding ceremonies, was booked, the lunch menu scrutinised (and frequently subjected to alterations) by Eugene, the flowers lavishly ordered, the cars organised and, of course, every detail of departure for the honeymoon and the honeymoon itself arranged in advance. Ella had collected her wedding dress and her 'going-away' suit. Her own two suitcases were packed, as was Eugene's.

'You want me to come over in case anyone comes back here?' said Carli. 'I mean, serve tea or drinks or whatever?' She was plainly anxious to feast her eyes on the guests and get a sight of Ella in her wedding dress.

'No one will come back here, Carli. Not even ourselves. We shall go straight from the hotel on our honeymoon.' Ella could see no particular reason to tell Carli where that honeymoon destination was or when they would be leaving from Heathrow. 'While we're away perhaps you'd like to check-up on your – er, sweets you've left in the drawers. There seem to be rather a lot of them, even some in one of the bathrooms.'

The woman stared. 'My what?'

Her tone was belligerent. Ella felt she had herself perhaps been too abrupt. 'I'm sorry, Carli. There's absolutely no reason why you shouldn't keep your sweets in this house. Forget it.'

'I never eat sweets. Never. You're mixing me up with someone else.'

Ella started to say there was no one else but she stopped herself. Carli had been vacuum-cleaning their bedroom and she left her to it, going back into the guest bathroom. The brown-and-orange pack of Chocorange – for that, she saw, was its name – was still there. Down in the drawing room, Eugene had put all her books away as he had promised, neatly, precisely, according to author and each one alphabetically. She had been kneeling there, in front of the row of Forsters, when he had come in and shouted at, as he thought, an intruder. But had he really believed the person on her knees there in the fading light was a burglar? A bookish burglar with a fondness for literature? It was extremely unlikely. And why had he undertaken to finish the task she had begun?

She squatted down on the floor again and removed from the shelf A Passage to India, Howard's End, two copies of The Longest Journey, Maurice and A Room with a View. She put her hand inside, feeling behind the remaining books, first to the right and encountering more space, then to the left, her fingers coming in contact with a plastic bag full of something. She pulled it out. The something was a number of packets of Chocorange. She counted ten of them. The bag in her hand, she began walking about the drawing room, opening a tallboy, lifting the lid of a Chinese chest, pulling out a drawer in a console table. A carved flange, which Eugene perhaps believed concealed a secret drawer, yielded four packs of Chocorange. Under some folded linen in the chest she found six more. The house was full of the things. At the handsome lateeighteenth- century wardrobe, which stood in the hall where they hung their coats, she hesitated. The idea of going through a man's pockets was repugnant to her – but surely that distaste would only apply when the search was for letters or photographs? She opened the wardrobe door and felt in the pocket of Eugene's raincoat, which he hadn't worn much since the relentlessly wet summer seemed to come to an end in the last days of August. No Chocorange but a mass of the cellophane wrap covers with their distinctive red taping, which had to be stripped off in order to reach the contents. The pockets of a light linen jacket contained much the same discarded wrappings.

After that Ella went all over the house causing Carli, who encountered her in one of the spare bedrooms, to ask her what she was looking for. Ella simply smiled and shook her head. By that time she had found twenty-three packets of the things but she had left them where they were, concealed inside drawers and cupboards, some hidden in a spongebag. Those, she thought, he probably intended to take to Como with him. This find made her look inside his big suitcase, where she found another six in an inside zip pocket.

That must mean he couldn't exist without them, not even on his honeymoon.

Seldom did Lance have occasion to go into a pharmacy or what Uncle Gib would have called a chemist's shop. He was doing so this time at the request of his mother. She herself was too busy watching repeats of Cagney and Lacey on ITV3 to go out and buy the aspirins of which she regularly ate fourteen or fifteen a day but had run out of, for she too was an addict in her own way. Lance chose this particular pharmacy because he passed its window on his way to visit Uncle Gib and it was the first one he had come to since walking down from his parents' flat. His walk necessarily took him down the Portobello Road and the sight of the stalls and small shops full of delectable goods made him feel even more acutely the lack of the means to buy them. Copies of designers' handbags, but so much like the real thing as to be indistinguishable from them, were everywhere this morning. A new shop had opened selling home-made soaps whose strong, nostril-burning scents dominated all the usual smells of bacon and cheese and doner kebab. They made Lance sneeze but Gemma liked that sort of soap and the 'natural' bath essences the shop also sold. He'd like to buy them for her even if they did give him an allergy. And he'd like to buy that green lace tunic with the sequins and those black velvet harem pants and that . . . It was no use. He was once more approaching skint status, Elizabeth Cherry's three hundred pounds and the thirty pounds Dave had produced nearly gone.

He hadn't seen Gemma since the night of the fire. But he had heard from her. The postcard she sent him was the first missive that might be called a letter he had ever had. It came to his parents' address, which she must have remembered from when he first met her. The postcard was a picture of the late Princess Diana with the infant Prince William. It said, How are you? I hope OK. I miss you. Abelard says to say hi. Lots of love, G.

He turned into Golborne Road and there was the pharmacy on his left. The man standing at the counter he recognised at once as White Hair, the rich git who was the owner of all that stuff he'd nicked and lost when Fize and his mates attacked him. Lance would have expected White Hair, if he had been in that shop at all, to have been buying expensive perfume for his girlfriend or maybe a new electric shaver. Instead, he was in the act of paying for three packs of sweets the assistant was just putting in a paper bag. Lance didn't expect to be recognised and he got a shock when White Hair turned round, gave him a curt nod and said good afternoon. For a moment Lance thought he must know him in his burglar's identity. Then he remembered trying and failing to claim the money found in the street. He muttered a 'cheers' in return but by that time White Hair had gone, taking his sweets with him.

Lance bought his mother's aspirins and began the walk back to Kensal Road where his parents lived. But before he reached it he recalled his mother telling him that Uncle Gib had moved in with those god-botherers, the Perkinses, in Fermoy Road. Lance didn't know the number but he had no difficulty in finding the house. Where its neighbours each had a laurel bush in their front gardens, the Perkinses had a sign proclaiming Jesus Lives!. Lance rang the bell.

There was no response. He rang again. This time he was aware of a flicker across the corner of his eye on the left side. Someone had twitched a curtain in the bay window. Then he noticed a narrow gap between the front door and its frame. The door wasn't shut but very slightly ajar. Expecting some kind of trap, he gave it a very cautious push. It swung open silently and, stepping over the threshold, he found himself in a narrow hallway.

Framed texts on the walls told him that the better the day the better the deed and that if he honoured his father and mother his days would be long in the land. There was no one about but an ashtray on the windowsill full of stubs of a familiar brand was evidence of Uncle Gib's presence in the house. The silence was disconcerting. Lance belonged in a generation that feels uneasy unless there is a perpetual murmuring of voices or throb of pop in the background. But having come here and made his way in, he wanted to see Uncle Gib. He wanted to tell him the truth about where he had been that night for Uncle Gib had been a burglar himself once. He might be angry, he would call him a no-good sinner, but he would understand and he would know Lance couldn't have been responsible for burning his house down.

Someone must be at home. They wouldn't have gone out and left the place open like that. Lance put his hand to the knob on the door on his left and turned it slowly clockwise. The door opened silently and he crept in. Afterwards he hardly knew why he hadn't screamed but he hadn't. Perhaps he'd been fascinated as well as horrified by what lay on the table. He'd clapped his hand over his mouth and advanced – tiptoeing for some reason – up to the body of Reuben Perkins.

The former Shepherd of the Children of Zebulun lay in state, the lower part of his body covered by a white sheet, his head resting on a white pillow. His hands were folded across his chest. The third stroke he had suffered had killed him but the second had twisted his mouth, pulling down one corner. Death had erased this distortion and Lance saw a noble face, more like a Roman emperor than an old lag. This was his first corpse, the first he had ever seen. So this was what it was like when you were dead. The eyes were closed, the eyelids white as the rest of the face. Very tentatively he put out one finger and touched Reuben Perkins's forehead. It felt cold, more marble than skin, the texture like touching the translucent surface of one of Gemma's candles.

A footfall in the hallway brought him back to reality. Then four people came into the room, elderly men and women he had never seen before. Uncle Gib and Mrs Perkins and another woman followed them. They crowded round the corpse, too absorbed in staring, head-shaking, and muttering what a saint the dead man had been, what a loss his death was, to notice Lance. But now was no time to speak to Uncle Gib. He slipped quietly out of the room as another group of mourners arrived, come to view the body.

He felt rather shaken. A nasty idea had come to him that he might dream about that dead man lying on a table, his slack cold hands folded, his eyelids unnaturally white. When he closed his eyes he seemed to see that sight again, it was so different from the dead people he'd seen on telly almost every day of his life.

He walked across the railway bridge and along Golborne Road to the canal, its waters ruffled by the cold wind into a thousand little ripples. Leaves were falling, the wind blowing them into flurries and settling them in quivering heaps. If he had kept to the towpath it would have taken him on to the southern edge of Kensal Green Cemetery, between it and the great gasworks, but he left it for Kensal Road, heading for his parents' home. He had put the dead Reuben Perkins out of his mind and was thinking about the aspirins he had bought for his mother and how, when he handed them over, she might let him stay indoors for the rest of the day, when an unmarked police car stopped and two men in plain clothes got out.

Most members of the public would have failed to recognise them as police officers but Lance knew. He identified them for what they were as surely as if their car had been painted in red and yellow squares and they dressed in dark uniforms and chequered caps. He muttered something about having to go home and see his mum and though they didn't exactly laugh, the older one's lips twitched like he'd got some sort of tic. They got him into the car exactly the way police did on the telly, one of them holding his head down with one hand and pushing him into the back seat with the other.

Uncle Gib was always telling him how ignorant he was but he wasn't so ignorant he didn't know they couldn't question him any more once he'd been charged. So he didn't mind being questioned yet again. It was warm in the interview room and he got cups of tea. At one point he said could he ask them something and when they didn't answer but just looked, he asked if Uncle Gib, Mr Gilbert Gibson, had told them he'd been round at his place and where to find him.

'We ask the questions,' said the one who twitched.

He went on denying that he'd been anywhere near Uncle Gib's house at the time of the fire. The young lady lawyer arrived and kept asking if they were going to charge Mr Platt. Because, if not, they should let him go. Lance wished she wouldn't. It only gave them ideas and that was exactly what it must have done. He knew there would be no escape and this time it was for real when he heard the words of the caution and all that stuff about things he might want to rely on in court. 'In court' made his blood run cold. It was going to be next morning, and murder and arson were the charges.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Everyone who read the Evening Standard and those who picked up a freebie in the street, read the paragraph about Lance Kevin Platt, twenty-one, of Kensal, west London, who had been charged that day with the murder of Dorian Lupescu and with setting fire to a house in Blagrove Road, West Ten. Ella read it but, because the name of the man who had applied to Eugene for his cash find had never registered with her, immediately forgot about it. Perhaps because he had seen him the day before in the Golborne Road pharmacy, Eugene remembered him and his name very well. At the same time, when telling Ella that he had only seen Lance Platt twice, he recalled that there had been a third sighting. Looking out of his bedroom window in the small hours of a morning he had seen the youth (as he had thought of him) with his characteristic backpack walking along the street in the direction of Denbigh Road. It was the night after he and Ella had been to the theatre to see St Joan. He had gone round to Elizabeth Cherry's to check that the house was secure, come back and got up later to eat a Chocorange – what else?

Now he had a very vivid memory of thinking that Lance Platt must be up to no good. And then, immediately afterwards, telling himself that it was bad to be suspicious of someone just because he was out in the street at the time when people he thought of as law-abiding were in bed asleep. It looked as if he had been right that first time. Still, whatever Platt had been doing walking along outside his house, it was obviously unconnected with murder and arson half a mile or more away on the Kensal borders.

Uncle Gib also read about it. His source was a giveaway newspaper called Metro and the news item brought him considerable satisfaction. It wasn't that he thought the police must be right or even that Lance had indisputably done the deeds, but rather that someone he had always disliked and disapproved of was getting his come-uppance at last. Gemma read it when she bought the Sun. She was out shopping in the Portobello Road Tesco with Abelard in the buggy and, in her own words to her mother, it gave her quite a shock. It was a crying shame, it must be a mistake. Lance hadn't been with her that night but maybe she should go along to the police station and say he had been.

'Oh, no, you don't,' said her mother. 'You want to keep a low profile. Suppose they've got proof it was him and you've stuck your neck out. You could go inside and then what about your boy? Come and give nanna a cuddle, my lambkin.'

Fize was refitting a transformer at a house in East Acton. As he put it himself, he broke the rule of a lifetime and went down to the pub in his lunch break. It was Ian Pollitt's local and, being without a job or having the prospect of getting one, Fize knew he would be likely to find him passing his empty midday hours in the Duchess of Teck. Fize had a lager and lime, which Ian said was a woman's drink, as bad as 'lady juice', which was what they called white wine.

'Maybe,' said Fize, 'and maybe I don't want to do my head in when we're talking about a couple of thousand volts. What d'you reckon to Lance Platt?'